My second reply, and for those not attending SourceCon (and you should be), my answer is this… with the competition today in finding, recruiting and hiring staff what if:

You send an email or make a phone call and they already know of you?

They saw your name on an industry or news site?

Heard you on a podcast or interview?

You spoke at event last week, 6 months or two years ago, followed you online and send you an email with their resume because in the past days they saw you Tweet out “the job” they have been looking for?

Here’s the deal… you can have the best Boolean search strings and scrapers and be sending the best-personalized email but if they don’t know who you are or hop online to search for you and find little or nothing at all are you going to be one of the two to four emails, calls they return?

I posted this last week:

Working on my #SourceCon presentation: “Having a Recruiter brand is about effectively doing your job. It’s not about being Internet famous”

Let me be very clear… having a recruiter brand is not about being Internet famous. Having a recruiter brand means candidates email or call you back. It also means if they are proactively searching for you they can find you. Here are some examples:

I am not trying to be most famous IT recruiter online or in the United States. Frankly, who has time for that anyway? What I am trying to be is a resource in Minneapolis and the Midwest as being someone knowledgeable about what I do. I’ll let the “cool kids” slug it out for Internet fame, glory and all the cool speaking gigs. I source, recruit, hire, build teams and evangelize… that’s my game.

Many of you may be thinking, “But I don’t have time to do this.” That’s fair and here is my reply… you literally cannot afford not to.

Right now one of the candidates you sent a highly personalized email to last week is looking at you and the other “X” recruiters who contacted them. And they are trying to figure out who to reply to. Part of their thought process likely is to ask friends, think about who they met at an event and go to LinkedIn and other sites and see who looks more credible.

Do you look credible, might they remember you?

Let’s go back in time for a moment… do you remember the “Great Recession?” I do. It still gives me the sweats.

How many pros did our industry lose? Some say 40% others say 60%. Let’s not get lost in the numbers other than to say A LOT.

There will be another recession one day. Let’s hope it is not as severe or long as the last one.

When it comes time for your company to think about who to keep and who to let go having a recruiter brand may help you keep your job. If you have a following, are liked and respected, have a digital footprint, seen as credible and are a good ambassador for your company… those things should help, right?

Article Continues Below

So start thinking about you as a recruiter from the candidate perspective and find ways to get more active in your company, town, region and industry. Attend events, speak, write and generally engage with people more than just the high volume, copy and paste email you have been sending.

And if you are attending SourceCon come hang out with me at my Thursday, 3 pm session. This post is an “intro to recruiter brand” and I will give you the blueprint and advanced steps on how to do this.